Official World Golf Ranking announces points changes for small events, repeat winners

The Official World Golf Ranking, the metric for assessing the world's best players as well as the standard for admission into golf's majors, has announced updates to the way it awards points. The new points methodologies change the way points are awarded for small-field events and for repeat winners.

For fields of 80 players or fewer, points will be distributed more heavily to finishers at the top of the leaderboard. Players who finish in the bottom 15 percent of events without a cut, or players who lose their initial matches in match play, will no longer receive points. In other words, the guaranteed-points reward for most small, no-cut events is going away. Small-field playoffs like the FedEx Cup, however, will continue to receive full points. (This rule does not apply to LIV Golf's 48-player fields, since the OWGR was careful to note that it only applies to "eligible tours" — which LIV, currently, is not.)

The OWGR also introduced a reward for multiple wins in a 52-week period. Players who win more than one tournament within a year will get a 60-percent points bonus for their second win and 70 percent for their third and successive wins. For players like Scottie Scheffler, who won four Tour events in 2022 and two in 2023, this change would mean a massive boost in points.

Across all the worldwide tours it tracks, the OWGR noted that since 2019 there have been an average of 207 individual winners each year at eligible tournaments. There have also been an average of 63 winners of two events within a 52-week period, and 39 winners of three or more events over the same timespan.

Still unresolved: LIV Golf's prospects for Official World Golf Ranking points. Even though LIV now claims many of the world's most talented and decorated players, including Jon Rahm and Cam Smith, LIV Golf events don't earn any points for their players. As a result, LIV players have plummeted in the rankings, putting their eligibility for majors in serious jeopardy.

Players who haven't already qualified for majors via previous wins must be above a certain rankings benchmark — top 50, in most cases. This means, generally, these players aren't eligible to play in the Masters, the PGA Championship, the U.S. Open and the Open Championship. LIV Golf continues to apply for rankings consideration as a tour, and the small-field concession in these latest updates could provide a pathway forward for LIV players to claim points.

The fact that an indisputably world-class player like Rahm, currently the No. 3-ranked player in the world, will soon fall below lesser players because of procedural issues, rather than on-course performance, undercuts the entire purpose of a world ranking. Rahm's move to LIV, in particular, could put more pressure on the OWGR to reconsider its ranking stance or work with LIV to develop a more ranking-friendly format for LIV's future events.